


Mandragora

by quantumvelvet



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Multi, Type: Dark Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:54:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25394194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quantumvelvet/pseuds/quantumvelvet
Summary: When Bren breaks and modern magic is unable to put him back together again, Astrid turns to the old tales in an attempt to restore what she refuses to lose.
Relationships: Astrid/Eodwulf/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16
Collections: Multifandom Horror Exchange (2020)





	Mandragora

**Author's Note:**

  * For [venndaai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/gifts).



_There are those who listen to our dreams._

The words echo in Astrid's mind in time with her footsteps, each one cautious, one in front of the other so that she doesn't veer off course and twist an ankle in the carriage ruts along the dirt path. The moonlight filtering through the trees that stretch over the road is uncertain, wavering as though reflected by a pool of water, not nearly bright enough to see her path clearly. She wishes, not for the first time, that she had a lantern to light her way, but in every account she'd been able to find, the rules had been explicit. No fire, no iron, no silver, no salt, no holy relics. Bring aught that is forbidden, and find nothing but a long and lonely wait in the cold – if the seeker is fortunate.

The first tales she'd heard, spun by her Gran one winter, when Astrid had been sick with fever and near enough to the Raven Queen's domain that her own mother had been half in mourning already, had warned of what might happen to the less fortunate. A wasted night would be bad enough after the months she's spent searching through old stories, mining truth from fancy and teasing out location from tales turned and twisted to reflect familiar fields rather than reality, after the careful lies she'd spun to get the liberty to stray beyond her teacher's immediate reach to a small town on the Empire's border. But she has nightmares still, ones where she lies unable to move while something snuffles at her belly, red eyes burning in the darkness, of sounds like wet cloth tearing, damp snuffles and the crunch of bone and gore-stained teeth in the darkness.

_Approach them carefully, with respect, or not at all._

The wood has grown silent around her, small animals frozen in the underbrush, even the wind gone still as though the world is holding its breath. The hairs on the back of her neck prickle, the sensation like the breath of someone standing far too close. She wishes, not for the first time, that she had Eodwulf beside her, someone to watch her back when her own eyes can't possibly see all things at all times. But she'd left him back at the inn, extracted a promise that he'd not come looking for her until daybreak, because every account she'd been able to find had been clear on that, too.

_Bring nothing with you that you're not prepared to lose._

The crossroads swims into view ahead of her, so suddenly that much as she might want to, Astrid can't write it off as merely a trick of the moonlight. The air seems to thicken around her, providing resistance to the last few steps, offering one last chance to turn back. She grits her teeth and plows forward, and on the fifth step the resistance vanishes suddenly, and she steps down hard enough to send a dull shock of pain shooting up from ankle to knee. The air is cold and still within the circle where the two roads meet, and to her left something creaks, the low grind of rope against wood in spite of the utter absence of wind.

A scent hits her nostrils, the sweetness of lilac thick enough to be cloying, and beneath it the faintest hint of sulfur and rot. Hands land on her shoulders, broad and long-fingered and faintly callused from experimenting with hazardous powders and components. Eodwulf's hands, their touch as familiar as her own skin, and she starts to turn with a harsh rebuke on her tongue before she catches herself.

_Do not look upon them, or you will be forever ensnared._

A voice chuckles in her ear, though no breath warms her cheek or stirs her hair. “Careful. It would be a pity to have come all this way and lose before you've even begun,” it says, and it doesn't speak with Eodwulf's voice, but Bren's. Not as she'd last heard it, torn and hoarse from screaming, but the voice she holds in her heart, warm and confident and just a little sly.

She straightens beneath the phantom hands, spine stiff and shoulders square. “I've come to make a bargain. A desire granted for a favour given.”

“Bold.” One of the hands on her shoulders lifts, fingers tracing over the edge of the fresh burn scars that wrap around her throat, a lover's hand seared into her skin. “Are you so certain you know what you desire?”

“Yes.” Pain flares along the scar, and for a moment the scent of flowers and rot is replaced by charring flesh, and her own shocked scream echoes in her ears.

“Ask once, then, and let the stars witness your petition.”

The sky darkens as though the moon has slipped behind the clouds, though when she chances a glance up, the sky is clear, and alien stars burn blue and green and violet, patterns shifting ever so slightly as she tries to make them out. She blinks once, twice, and tears her gaze away, fixing it resolutely on the ground in front of her, on the tufts of grass and small stones poking up from the worn dirt.

“I wish the mind of Bren Aldric Ermendrud to be healed, and for him to walk free of Vergesson Sanatorium, permanently and with no relapse.”

“Oh?” The voice has shifted, no longer Bren's, but the harsher sound of Master Ikithon's, impatient and filled with contempt. “Your desires are so small? Not personal power, not the shaping of a nation, but the mind of one man?”

“Power, I can earn on my own, enough to shape a nation if I choose to,” Astrid replies, forcing herself to remain still as the blunt fingers of Eodwulf's hands dig into her skin, as they only ever have in moments of complete abandon. “I've told you what I wish; strike a bargain, or release me without impediment or forfeit.”

“Stubborn girl,” her mother's voice says, and the taste of something bile-bitter sits for a moment on her tongue. The wind kicks up suddenly, and a miniature spiral of sand swirls and eddies in front of her feet, before whisking away, leaving the lumpy nuggets of pale stone bare. _Are they stone?_ There's something strangely familiar, even in the dim light.

“Ask a second time, then,” her mother's voice says, clotted now, as though there's something caught in her throat. “And let the air witness the cost.”

_Be doubly cautious once your request has been accepted; you can still walk away if the cost is too high, but not without forfeit._

“I wish the mind of Bren Aldric Ermendrud to be healed,” she repeats, “and for him to walk free of Vergesson Sanatorium, permanently and with no relapse.”

“It can be done,” her mother's voice says. “But it will be bloody work.”

“Fortunately,” Bren's voice whispers in her other ear, “we're no strangers to bloody work, are we?”

“What needs to be done?” Astrid asks.

“First, you'll need a mandrake root, steeped in the blood of a traitor beneath the dark of the moon. Place it within a chest made from the gallows on which an innocent man was executed. With it, place a liar's tongue, and the charred fingerbones of someone slain by the person they loved most dearly.” A hand caresses her cheek, fingernails pricking sharp as a cat's claws. On her shoulders, the phantom hands remain in place. “When the next full moon rises, bury it beneath a dead tree at a crossroads. It isn't necessary to return to this one – any crossing of the paths will do. At midnight, it will awaken, and the root of your friend's madness will emerge. You must slay it quickly, or it will overpower you and return to destroy him.”

“And that will pay for his restoration?”

Another chuckle, the scent turned thick enough with rot that she has to force her gorge down. “No. For payment, I'll take the heart of a sun-haired boy, not yet twenty years of age.”

Astrid considers the cost for only a heartbeat, far less than she would have expected, far less than she would have paid. “Then we have a bargain.”

“Then speak your desire a third time, and let the earth seal the compact.”

“I wish the mind of Bren Aldric Ermendrud to be healed,” she repeats one last time, “and for him to walk free of Vergesson Sanatorium, permanently and with no relapse.”

The ground beneath her feet rumbles, and she falls to her knees. Over the cracking of the earth, she hears a voice that sounds like nothing that has ever been human whisper, “Bargain struck.”

And then the night is still again, and the watery moonlight falls all too clearly on the small bones scattered around her hands. The scars on her neck itch and burn, and it's a long moment before she manages to force herself to her feet and begin the weary trudge back to the in where she'd left Eodwulf.

* * *

It's not difficult to convince him to help her procure what she needs – he's not a dim man, but he's always been a follower, happy to subordinate his decisions first to Bren, and now, in that aching absence, to her.

The tongue of a liar is not hard to procure. The man is small and mousey, a court clerk suspected of accepting bribes to interfere with the mechanism of the law. He's innocent of that, but by the time Eodwulf finishes the interrogation, he's heard five different conflicting stories, each one more desperate as the man searches both to prove his innocence and his usefulness, as desperate for recognition as he is to save his own life. Eodwulf brings the tongue to astrid wrapped in waxed cloth that has been imbued with spells to preserve the dead, meant for the transportation of corpses, but useful for this as well. No one questions the man's disappearance - or if they do, they're clever enough to keep it quiet.

The heart required for the devil's payment is only a little more difficult. Astrid comes across the boy by chance, an understudy in a troupe of traveling players, and it does not take overlong to lay down clues to justify the suspicion that he passes information for would-be rebels in his travels. It takes even less time to justify his death to herself - what can can one barely-skilled thespian bring to the world, compared to the work Bren might yet do for the good of the empire? She burns his body to disguise what she has taken, and has banished all thought of his cries for mercy by the time she's finished scrubbing the smoke from her hair.

The blood is not so simple - traitors are harder to come by than liars and young blond boys, and are disinclined to conform to a mage's schedule. Astrid is beginning to despair of fulfilling this requirement by the necessary date when she remembers that the three of them, she and Bren and Eodwulf, had routinely collected blood and tissue from those they'd executed during training, components both difficult to come by for most, and necessary for certain forms of summoning. It takes all of her guile to talk her way into the vault at the academy that houses such rare items, but in the end she walks out with four large vials of blood, labeled with its origins - gods bless Bren's penchant for precision - on the day before the dark moon.

The gallows-wood is the hardest piece to come by, and it's Eodwulf's turn this time to comb through old and poorly-kept records, until he finds an account that seems credible - that of an innocent man executed, then returned as a revenant to seek retribution, penned in the harsh hand and harsher language of the paladin of the Dawnfather who had been dispatched to end the creature's torment. He departs just after the new moon, and returns with only two days to spare, carrying a small box of fragile-looking greying wood, crafted by his own hand. Once, he had been a carpenter's son, and the skills his father had taught him before his talent for magic became clear, when he'd held his parents as the center of his world and could never have believed they would stray from the right path - those skills remain.

The bones are the simplest of all to find. They know full well where Bren's parents are interred.

* * *

The earth beneath the dead tree is cold and sour-smelling, like the breath of some ancient thing torn from a mouldering grave. Astrid breathes shallowly as she places the box in the small hollow they'd excavated between two of the larger roots, then steps back to give Eodwulf room to shovel the soil back in again. And then they stand waiting, side by side, just far enough apart for a phantom third to stand between them, while the moon climbs higher in the sky, bleaching the dead wood white as stone.

When the moon hits its zenith, the ground shudders. Eodwulf draws his sword, and Astrid's hand drops to her spell pouch. The tree cracks, splitting at the base as though struck with lighting, and inside the split a large, membranous sack pulses, faint light like guttering flames flickering within. A shadow passes beneath the skin of the sack, resolving into the shape of two hands as the thing within manages to gain enough purchase to tear its way out in a gush of stinking fluid.

It takes two staggering steps, then collapses to its knees, naked skin ash-grey, cracked and bleeding embers from a dozen gashes. The face it raises to the moonlight resembles Bren's, leeched of all colour, with eyes of swirling smoke. Astrid's fingers twist the shape of her spell, and she can feel Eodwulf move beside her, sword raised.

"Wait!" the thing cries, throwing up its hands as a feeble shield agains their unified will to see it slain and three hearts made whole. "You have to liten. He's lied to you, lied to us all!"

The spell leaves Astrid's hand, reflecting off the brilliant steel of Eodwulf's sword as it pierces the simulacrum's chest. The thing's eyes grow wide, and it reaches for them, one hand resting briefly atop Eodwulf's on the sword's hilt. But its form is already crumbling, and it collapses, falling in on itself as the embers in its veins gutter and die.

Eodwulf grimaces, scrubbing the back of his hand against his breeches as though he can wipe away the feel of the thing's touch before pulling a cloth out to clean his sword. "What do you think it meant?" he asks.

"Nothing," Astrid replies. She steps over the pile of skin and ash, and peers into the hollow from which the thing had been birthed. "A trick, meant to turn us from our goal at the last."

But she can't quite ignore the shiver of unease along her spine as she takes in the leathery heart that sits amid the splintered wood and slime of the dissolving membrane.

* * *

  
  
For two days afterward, they wait, and on the third day Master Ikithon summons them to his country house, and there in the parlor - thinner than they'd last seen him, and paler, his hair gone shaggy with lack of maintenance, but otherwise looking well - sits Bren, hair red as the setting sun, eyes a bright, clear blue. He regards them coolly as he rises, inclining his head as though they're barely more than strangers, as though they've never shared a bed, nor spoke of their dreams together, nor tended each others hurts in the dark of night, when the slivers driven beneath their skin burned and throbbed like thorn vines burrowing into flesh. "Astrid. Eodwulf. It is good to see you again."

She searches his face, looking for a hint of softness, or even of anger that they had left him so long, and visited so infrequently, and not at all in the past month. She's always prided herself on being able to read his expression even when he attempts to hide his thoughts, but there's nothing there. "Bren. We've missed you terribly. Are you well?"

He meets her gaze, just for a moment, and in his pupils swirl pinpricks of light, green and blue and violet, patterns shifting ever so slightly as she tries to make them out. She blinks once, twice, and his eyes are just eyes again. "Quite well, thank you. I apologize for my outburst." He glances briefly at the shiny, stretched scars at her neck, acknowledging the injury even as his expression shows no hint of concern for it. "It won't happen again. Will you join us? Master Ikithon was just about to detail an assignment, and it would be useful to have companions to compensate for how out of practice I've become."

She swallows a harsh laugh before it can burst free, and she feels Eodwulf shift at her side, hand flexing as he stops himself from reaching out to her, sensing her dismay even if he hasn't yet grasped the source of it. “Of course. There's so much we'll need to tell you so you're properly caught up.”

_Be triply cautious of how you word your wish, and of what you agree to in return, less you lose everything you hoped to gain._


End file.
